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Creator of Android Is Launching the Essential Phone and Essential Hone

Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, is launching a new type of smartphone. Essential Phone combines an edge-to-edge display with a modular system for accessories. Essential, Rubin's company is also launching a new Amazon Echo competitor with a focus on privacy.

Andy Rubin, the founder of Essential and the original creator of the Android OS platform, left Google more than two years ago. His vision is to marry his background in software with artificial intelligence in consumer hardware. Armed with about a 40-person team, filled with recruits from Apple and Alphabet's Google, he etablished his company and just unveiled two new products.

The Essential Phone features a 5.71-inch edge-to-edge QHD display that reaches all the way to the top of the phone and runs around the 8-megapixel front-facing camera.

The phone is constructed from titanium and ceramic. It has a fingerprint sensor and camera lenses on it srear side, along with a modular accessory system that works via a pair of magnetic pins.

Initially, the cordless connector pins will hook up to the company's 360-degree camera and phone dock, with more modular products planned. A USB-C connector at the bottom of the phone provides the only other connectivity; no headphone jack is included.

The Essential Phone is powered by a Qualcomm 835 processor, 4GB of RAM, and has 128GB of storage, while its 13-megapixel rear-mounted dual lens camera includes a monochrome sensor and supports 4K at 30 frames per second. The phone runs some form of Android, but the company promises no extraneous software is pre-installed. Available in black, grey, white, and "Ocean Depths" colors, the phone will launch in the U.S. later this summer and cost $699.

Essential's second product is a competitor to Amazon's Echo, called "Essential Home."

The intelligent assistant device has a round touchscreen, which allows users to control music, ask general interest questions, set times, and control lights. It can be activated with a question, a tap, or even a "glance", according to Essential, suggesting some form of face detection.

The Essential Home will run the company's open platform Ambient OS, allowing it to interface with existing smart home products as well as SmartThings, HomeKit, Nest, and other popular standards.

The device will let the user choose between Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri. Like an iPhone, the Home will do much of the processing for voice and image recognition on the device itself rather than sending data to remote servers.